I’m sharing a new iteration of the design principles for the Socially Dynamic Organisation: this format is an attempt to capture the systemic nature of adaptation, and the internal tensions that exist as we strive to build it. Increasingly, i see the design of this organisation as a series of spaces, embedded capability, guided by a leadership mindset.

Last week, i wrote a little about ‘constraint’: i’m representing the Socially Dynamic Organisation with six spokes, and a series of external components. This constrains the number of pieces we can play with, but the model is always going to be an abstraction: the purpose here is to allow us to explore tensions and opposition. The relationship between ‘control’ and ‘innovation’, or ‘leadership’ and ‘community’.

The nature of these tensions is not set: better to consider it as fluid, and it ties into the new work i’m doing around Change, which encourages us to consider the alignment of energy between disparate activities. So i guess, to some extent, this nature of ‘systemic’ and ‘interconnected’ elements is permeating much of my work, which is what we would expect maybe when considering complex and dynamic social systems.

I’m prototyping this framework again today, with a group of thirty leaders, to help shape strategy and approach to how we actually create this type of organisation: this is the nature of all my work. Adaptive, rapidly prototyped, often wrong, but hopefully reaching new heights of ignorance. That’s the nature of exploration: not being right, but learning to be right, within a context.